Midnight's Path, Part Two
by unkeptsecret
Summary: It was a dark path paved with girlish ideals that had lead her into Afghanistan to be burned. But she wasn't Sofiya anymore. She was Balalaika, and the path to Roanapur awaited. (Best enjoyed after reading Amigodude's Part One but probably not entirely necessary.)
1. Wounds

She looked up.

A sliver of moon hung in the sky, posed like a sickle at the top of its arch, but then the smoke blotted out the stars.

From behind them, a scream ended in a gurgle. The thump of helicopter blades drowned out the reply of gunfire. Great waves of smoke rolled in, glowing a steady orange laced with bursts of yellow as someone worked a flamethrower. Another throb of screams. A man dashed past them, clothes on fire. He took a bullet in the back, stumbled, fell, and kept burning.

Boris dodged right to avoid him, never slowing his heavy-booted run. She bounced in his arms, a jumble of limbs. The fresh gash bisecting his face leaked a steady stream of blood, which trickled down his face and dropped from his chin like tears. They splashed against her unearthly pale hands.

A memory welled up:_ A little girl in a red dress. Grandfather in his military splendor leaning down to tweak her nose. "You look lovely in red, little one," he said._

Boris raised her to the lip of the helicopter's door. Other arms closed around her. Frantic voices—afraid but controlled.

The space around her filled with bodies, and then she felt the tug of thwarted gravity as they lifted into the air.

Dimly, Balalaika knew this was her rescue.

The helicopter pitched and shook. Someone to her left vomited, and the scent made her sick, too. She lacked the strength to turn her head. The bile on her fresh burns felt worse than kiss of the propane torch that had carved them into her.

* * *

Voices reached her.

"She doesn't remember?" Chaikin, her liuetenant, asked.

"Not the worst of it. She said that she remembers when the enemy took her, and then waking up here," Boris said.

Their shadows swayed on the canvas wall of the medic tent. She could see them out of the corner of her good eye. Also to her left, the faithful drip of her IV pushed saline into her veins. The right side of her was a wash of white, all gauze and draped sheets.

Chaikin sighed. "Thank God for small blessings. We will take what favors we can, eh?"

Boris may have nodded. The shifting shadows were too hard to read.

Balalaika closed her eyes. Time flowed like sand around her.

It was so hard to keep track of the days.

Eventually, Boris returned to his chair by her cot. He was there whenever she awoke, her silent sentry. The black line of sutures marching like ants across his face bespoke his unfailing loyalty. He took that wound for her. He would bear the scar for the rest of his life.

When he had asked what she could remember, she looked into his face and told him what he needed to hear.

No, she didn't have any memories of her rescue. Not the horrible ride on the helicopter. Not the stench of her own seared flesh.

But of course, she remembered. What had she ever done to deserve to forget? Balalaika had all of it there, fixed, in her brain.

She remembered the moment that the medics had stripped her to assess the damage. Her uniform was in shreds after what her captors had done to her, so Boris had used his own jacket to cover her during the rescue. Perhaps he meant to protect her modesty; perhaps he wanted to keep the swirling dirt from her wounds. Whatever his reason, he had wrapped her up and pressed the fabric into her burns as he carried her out of the bloody cell. It hadn't hurt at the time, but when the medics removed the fabric, large swatches of her skin went with it.

Nothing that Balalaika had ever endured- not the pliers or the blade, not the agony of the propane torch in the crook of her throat, not the weight of her mistakes or the horror of her memories, nothing- compared to the sudden, ripping loss of acres of her skin.

She would not tell him that truth.

Sofiya would have. Sofiya had believed in ideals like truth and honor so Sofiya had gone away to war, but Sofiya did not come back.

In her place, Balalaika lied without hestitation.

It was the weirdness of fate that Sofiya had sought so hard to prove her existence. Olympic gold around her neck, line of war medals, things that no man could take from her. She tried and tried to make the world recognize her.

And now everyone knew Balalaika.

The burns qualified her for medical discharge but she still had a use in Afghanistan, so the paperwork delayed and faltered in the process. They pumped her with painkillers, dressed her in a fresh-pressed uniform, and sent her into the fray again because Balalaika was legend. The Soviet troops saw her as a hero, her Desantniki worshipped her as a goddess, and their enemies feared her as a demon.

One glimpse of her golden hair gave the troops renewed faith in victory and sent the Mujahideen running in terror.

Balalaika the Indestructible.

_She of the half-face_.

Balalaika the Brave.

_She the child-killer_.

Russia, personified.

She could not fight, of course. The drugs left her too woozy to aim, even if she had the strength to shoulder a weapon. Her abilities were a non-issue. They only needed her to be seen. Propped up like a puppet in her crisp uniform, fresh blood leaking into her bandages, Balalaika hated the spoils of her blinding ambitions.

* * *

Once, she caught herself say aloud, "I want to go home."

As soon as she said it, Balalaika felt like a fool. She had no home, had nothing of the sort since Grandfather died, but the edges of her vast continents of burns foamed with pus. Fever made her shiver even in the heat of day. Maybe, she thought, she was asking to die.

The next morning, there was a man in Boris's chair.

"The rumors say that you saved one of them," he said. "A child."

Balalaika squinted through the glint of artificial light ricocheting off the polished military bars and shiny buttons on his jacket.

During her failed raid across the border, Balalaika had grabbed the sole survivor, an Afghan child, and shoved the little girl onto the last working helicopter with the rest of her wounded men.

Her mouth tasted like sand when she answered.

"I did not kill one of many," she said. "Is that your definition of saving?"

The general laughed, low and gentle. "I see your grandfather's spirit lives in you still, even though he is gone. We were friends once, him and I."

Balalaika chose silence.

The general's smile faded. "In another war, your little indiscretion would have been nothing, but not now. What would happen if the soldiers knew their Balalaika was a Afghan sympathizer? What if they found out that she had mercy?" He rose and put on his hat. "I will do what I can for you, but I am afraid it isn't much. You have made enemies here. Your kind always does."

He left her alone with the sound of the wind pulling at the corners of her little room. Balalaika thought about the only Russian man in Afghanistan who had the ego to stand against her. Major Lavrenti Sarychin, the putrid Buzzard of Kabul. She had beaten him two fractured ribs into him and then blackmailed him for making a forced pass at her. She still felt his fish-wharf breath on her neck.

The discharge processed quickly. Two weeks later, Balalaika was transferred to a veteran hospital in Volgograd. Her military career ended without announcement or fanfare and somewhat less than honorably.

If Sarychin had spread his nasty rumors to destroy her, then he was a fool. The hospital lacked for much, but it had more than any field med tent in Afghanistan. The transfer saved her life. Her burns had turned with infection. She needed antibiotics and weeks of quiet rest in a sterile room.

Because of the transfer, Balalaika lived.

That bastard.

* * *

After two months in the Volgogard hospital, the doctors stopped allowing her painkillers.

Balalaika knew that she was an addict. The doctors called drug dependence a necessary evil, given the nature and extent of her wounds, but she didn't know everything beyond the pain that that the drugs had been keeping at bay. Desires. Regret. Remorse. Self-doubt. All of these feelings had been present but dormant during her time on opium and, later, morphine. Without chemical intervention, her emotions returned in force, and she discovered that she no longer knew how to keep them tamped down.

She cried. Oh, how she cried. For the first week, she wept like a mad woman. She cried in front of nurses, doctors, orderlies. She couldn't stop, and she feared one of her men would visit and witness the wreckage of her pride.

But none of them came that week. Her only visitor was a young, blonde woman. She stood in the doorway of the room, never entering. When she turned her head, Balalaika saw a mass of ugly scar tissue across her face.

It was like looking into a broken mirror.

Whoever she was, the woman did not speak, and she did not stay.

* * *

Balalaika did not have many visitors, really. Most of her days were as quiet and still as a lake of ice.

Lieutenant Piotr Chaikin, with his ruin of a hand, was at the the same hospital for the first month. He filled her room with chatter about dice and blackjack circles until he was released. Balalaika did not ask about his debts. He would not have told her, even if she did, and she had no authority to lecture him. After all, she had staked the sum of her futures on a single bet of military glory and lost.

Menshoff came by a few times, but he never knew what to say. He brought vodka and drank most of it himself before he left.

Yevgeny made the most awkward of appearances with a clutch of wilting daisies. He did not raise his eyes from his shoelaces, stayed for fewer than ten minutes even though he had made the long trip from Moscow for the sole purpose of seeing her, and did not come again.

Boris came the most frequently. Balalaika minded his company the least, perhaps because he had a habit of coming while she was asleep. She only heard about most of his visits through offhand comments from the nurses. On Sundays, he came while she was awake with a newspaper and a brown bag of baked sweets. They talked about the news and ate. She had an appetite for so few things, but the tea cookies melted in her mouth, all of that sugar falling to nothing. They did not speak of the past or the future.

Boris was the only one who came to meet her on the day of her release from the hospital. He paid for their cab fare to the train station where she would start her long journey to Leningrad. Her uncle had arranged for her to start a job there. A secretary. No one in her family could stomach her presence, so her uncle's sudden interest in her welfare wasn't a kindness. It was his way of keeping her off his doorstep. Even so, Balalaika had no choice but to take it. She had no money and few friends left.

Before he left her, Boris handed her a man's military coat, neatly folded into a square.

"He was a good man," he said.

The weight of it surprised her, and the softness. This coat had belonged to Sokolov. She could tell from the minute nick in the collar and the dented top button. She had spent every day for two years with him, his shoulder matched by hers. Of course, she knew it was his. Balalaika let the folds fall out and swung it around her shoulders.

"Thank you," she said.

"Good-bye, Kapitan," Boris said and saluted.

Without thinking, she returned the gesture.

He smiled at her, a grim tight smile which she did not mirror.

* * *

The train was delayed. Balalaika did not care one way or the other. Sokolov's coat kept her warm enough, but the crowds in the train station made her fingers twitch. She found a bench that let her keep her back to a wall and spent hours scanning the shifting tide of faces.

The blonde woman with the scarred face drifted through the sea of strangers. Balalaika thought it was a coicidence, but after her fourth pass, that theory died.

The bench creaked in relief as she left her post.

The woman was easy to track. Balalaika caught her near the water fountain. She did not look surprised.

"Do I know you?" Balalaika asked.

The woman shook her head.

"What do you want with me, then?"

"Someone poured acid on me while I slept," she said. There was a sing-song lilt in her delicate voice. "Then, they dressed me in a man's uniform and brought me to the battles. I didn't understand. I was a clerk. A secretary, really. For Major Sarychin. But then..."

Balalaika did not need to hear the rest of the woman's story. The image of Balalaika still had use in Afghanistan, but Sarychin wanted her gone. All he needed was to plant rumors and offer up a replacement.

That bastard.

"You have my apologies," Balalaika said.

The woman smiled a little. "I wanted to see the famous Balalaika. You are much taller than I am. Beside the hair, I don't think we look a thing alike."

"The scars," Balalaika said.

"Of course." The woman shifted. When she spoke again, her voice was nothing more than an echo. "What happened to the one who burned you?"

"I made him eat the torch," Balalaika said.

The woman nodded. "I envy you."

And then she was gone, another figure flowing from the station onto the cold streets.

On the train, Balalaika wrapped herself in a dead man's coat and watched the grey landscape slip away.

If there was a reason that she was still alive, she couldn't see it. But brave men had suffered to rescue her. Good men had died to carry out her orders. She would not disgrace their sacrifice with something as selfish as suicide.

It wasn't much of a reason to live, but it was something.


	2. Stasis

She cannot run, but walking is fine. It takes longer, and there are so many hours in the day.

On cold mornings, the thigh that took the shrapnel is stiff and difficult. She stands in the shower and kneads at the pale spider's web of scar tissue until the hot water runs out. It doesn't seem to help. The limp lasts for miles, but it works loose eventually.

The streets are cramped and winding. Queues form outside the market to scrabble over whatever sorry offerings have been replenished in the night. Old women in babushkas push twig-bound brooms. Balalaika walks past them. They do not spare a glance for her.

The wind slips past her scarred face like a hand.

At her job, she thins the typewriter ink with water because the month is poor, again. Her assigned work requires no thought: typing and filing and sorting. She tries to make it last. She eats slowly in the cafeteria three times during each day, but she always finishes her assignments before the shift ends. She can't leave. The manager knows her unfortunate heritage. Twice, he has reported her for going early.

She prefers not to become involved with her work, but her mind conjures up memories when idle. It craves distraction, so Balalaika analyzes the shipping forms that she spends hours copying in triplicate. Finding the patterns. Making predictions of tomorrow's movements. Taking note of the places where cargo disappears. The mafia turf battles are easy to track in this way. So are the impending food shortages.

It is dark when she walks home. She stops for bread and checks her mail. Sometimes there is a letter from one of her men. Mostly, the box is empty.

Her flat is under a soap factory, a single room with no windows to let out the smell of lye and mildew.

She puts her coat on the back of a hundred-year-old chair. The bed frame is a Gambs. The furniture came from her mother and her grandfather, shipped directly to the address by her uncle. The boxes from him yielded treasure and trash alike, all packed in a layer of dust. He must not have opened them before he sent them, so anxious to be rid of everything that was hers, or might have been hers.

Every item that she extracted from those boxes is in use in the flat or neatly lined up around her room like a perimeter defense. If she needs something like socks or a new kettle, she selects an artifact and makes a trade on the black market.

Tonight, she needs nothing.

She takes off her boots by the door and washes her face and cup in the same small sink. Her toothbrush and the remainder of her pills share the shelf with her few dishes. Balalaika draws down a paring knife with her medicine bottle and quarters each pill, vitamins and a sedative, to make her supply last. The needed dose is so tiny that she takes it without water.

The mattress accepts her weight without complaint.

She falls asleep quickly and dreams of nothing.

She is not dead, but what she has isn't a life either. She knows this. She knows it can't last.

The days are long, but the years are fast.


	3. Smoke and Blood

The summer of 1988 had hands of ice. Even in June, the weather required Leningrad's citizens to wear their great coats on either end of the long days. Everything, it seemed, would prefer to hibernate, but the quickening would come sure enough. She could feel it stirring under the earth.

She had lived the same small life in Lennigrad for seventeen months, the longest that she had ever stayed in a single place since she lived with her uncle. How many years ago was that now? The answer came slowly. At least ten. Balalaika remembered her uncle's great belly tucked under the polished edge of the long dining table at breakfast. When he laughed, the whole table shook. Her aunt made blinis and let her drink coffee paled by cream, and her uncle told great stories of Russia's glories while they ate. She had never been so happy. After ten months with them, the tidal politics of the Party shifted again. The elite whispered her father's name once again with a hiss of disgust. _Traitor. Traitor's daughter. _She was no longer allowed to take meals with the family. Food was left on a tray by her door. Even the house staff avoided her. Within a month, a man in a uniform came to pack little Sofiya and her one small trunk into a brute of a car. No one bothered to tell her goodbye. Watching her uncle's estate disappear in the back window, she had vowed to never let a place seem like her home again. The loss of it hurt too much.

It seemed like two lifetimes had passed since then. She had almost forgotten.

Balalaika had not realized how much she had fallen in love with her quiet little life in Leningrad until she arrived at work one morning to find another woman at her desk, fingers dancing over her typewriter. The insistent clattering of the type keys filled the room. No banal chatter from the office bitties, no pointless shifting of papers, or no scraping of chair legs on the hard floor as someone slipped out to run an errand during office hours. In the eerie quiet, Balalaika heard the manager clear his throat to speak. He was a pale, thin man, six inches shorter than she was, and forever scheming of a way to worm his way into the good graces of Party. Perhaps they were whispering her father's name again, and he saw another chance to show his allegiance by sacking a traitor's only child.

He opened his void of a mouth. Balalaika wanted to stop his words with her fist.

"You see," he began.

She turned and left before she could hear more. There was shame, which she has learned to stomach, and then there was _disgrace_.

Her angry footsteps carried her home in half the usual time, and when she rounded the corner, the roiling mass of black smoke pouring out from the soap factory that sat over her home greeted her with a sooty belch.

Her home was burning.

The soap factory was large, and it took the better part of the day to turn to ash, despite the efforts to extinguish the blaze. Balalaika watched the flames lick the brick through each blown-out window and door frame from across the street. She had nowhere else to go.

They told her that only four things survived the fire: a box of her mother's clothes, a chair, the television, and her pills.

The driver helped her carry them into the temporary housing allotted to her after a long evening of forms and questions down at the local station.

The hallway of her new building stank of urine, but her assigned room was clean, if barren.

"I hate to leave you here," the driver said as he set the box by the door. "This place isn't good for anyone. Too many drunks and dead-ends."

"Thank you for your help, Comrade," Balalaika said.

"Sure. Good luck, Miss."

The door closed.

There was nothing to do. No work. No one to visit. No errands to fulfill. She swallowed the pill whole instead of quartering it as usual and fell asleep on the bare mattress.

When she awoke, it was a greying twilight again. She drank water from the tap, cupped in her hands because she had no glass to drink. The move had busted the speakers on the television. She had to sit within six feet of it to hear anything, so she parked the chair in front of the screen, folded one of her mother's dresses like a invalid's blanket over her lap, and watched. The Olympics were on.

The second whole pill took a few hours to take effect.

Another day passed. And another. The scenes on the television flowed from one event to the next. She took another pill. She saw the faces of her men in the athlete's faces. Those solemn eyes stamped with worry lines. They begged without begging, _Lead us. _

Into what? She shook her head as if the answer would fall free from her hair and land on the lace of her mother's gown.

On television, an American won the gold medal for the 50 meter rifle event. Balalaika would have done better. That woman's form was too tight. It was luck. She took another pill.

Boris said something. Someone was dead. Shameful poverty.

Or were those her words?

"Go away," she said, and they did.

Or they just left.

She looked up, and they were gone.

Something flared and washed in her a sudden, brief jolt of light.

She looked down, and the television stared back at her with its one dead eye.

Maybe they had never been there.

A terrible thought began to form in Balalaika's mind. Something was not right. As that realization took a lazy spin around in her heavy brain, another part of her mind heard the door opened and then high heels punctuating someone's approach.

Balalaika wanted to speak, but the words took so long to form in her mouth.

The slap came fast, whipping her head to the side with a golden trail of unwashed hair following behind.

Balalaika blinked.

The second slap knocked her out of the chair.

The tiny part of her that never slept growled in rage. She looked up.

A familiar face looked down at her. A woman. Hands on her narrow hips and a steadfast frown. Balalaika tried to remember her name.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" said the not-a-stranger.

Balalaika tried to answer. The woman grunted in impatience. She hauled Balalaika to her feet and dragged her to the bathroom. The shower's water ran red with rust as the unused pipes were called into service after a long season of disuse. The woman shoved Balalaika under the icy spray.

"What the hell did they do to you?" the woman said. She surveyed the near empty bathroom as if looking for an answer. Balalaika wanted to tell her not to bother, but she couldn't match the other's speed. The spark of recognition snapped and grew.

The woman reached for the lone bottle of pills on the lip of the sink, snapped off the lid with a manicured thumb, and dumped the lot into her free hand. "Who gave these to you?"

The cold water stung, but more of Balalaika came back to life as it soaked her yards of hair and her clothes. She looked into the face of the intruder and a name came to her.

"Hummingbird?"

Mirela smiled wide. "Yes, it's me. We went to fucking hell together and back. How could you forget that?"

Balalaika shook her head. Everything felt faraway and grey.

"These pills. Have you been taking them?" Mirela asked.

"Yes."

"Who gave them to you?"

"Doctor. At the hospital," Balalaika managed.

"Do you remember his name?"

Balalaika shook her head.

"Doctor, my ass. This is black market stuff. Illegal here." Mirela flicked a pill off her palm with long acrylic nail. The pill bounced off Balalaika's forehead, tumbled into the tub and slipped down the drain.

"Christ, you are drugged out. The hell bitch I knew in the desert would have broken my hand for slapping her. And she wouldn't have let some horse tranquilizer of a sedative hit her in the face. What did you do to yourself?"

Balalaika tucked a bit of her cheek between her teeth and bit down. The pain was wonderful, bright and sharp. The sweet copper of her own blood filled her mouth. Her words came easier now.

"The men. They were here."

"Yes, yes," Mirela sighed. "Boris told me that you turned them down, but I had to see it for myself. Shit, you look pathetic. Want out of there?"

"No," Balalaika said. The water felt good. Cold. Real.

"Did they tell you?" Mirela asked.

A memory came back. Balalaika suddenly felt sick to her stomach.

"They told me that Lieutenant Chaikin is dead."

"Not just dead. Killed in his bed. What else did they tell you?"

Balalaika's memory turned up a blank. "Nothing."

Mirela leaned a hip into the sink and crossed her arms across her chest. "Those cowards."

"Do not say such things in presence," Balalaika snapped. It surprised Balalaika how much she had missed her voice at volume, her anger.

Mirela blinked, then laughed. "Sorry. I'm sorry. It's just that men are such babies about their pride. They probably thought that you would want revenge, no questions asked. The problem is that Chaikin was just the first. They will be next." She reached into her coat pocket and taped two cigarettes out of a crumpled case, using a wooden match to light both before flicking it into the shower. The match went out with a reluctant hiss.

"What happened?"

"That's the problem. No one knows anything except that it's bad," Mirela said with a sigh. "Probably worse than I know, and I know it's bad. Here."

Balalaika accepted the offered cigarette, set it between her damp lips and inhaled. The flavor of smoke mingled with the blood. That taste, again, bitter in her mouth. The awakening heart within her knocked against her chest once, twice. Her days of self-pity ended now.

"Tell me every thing you know," she said.

* * *

_A/N: Heavily revised chapters 1-3 on April 15-16 2013. Prepping the story for resurrection. _


End file.
